Code Anywhere with Codeanywhere

Nov 5, 2015 • Jonathan Frappier

As a Windows user in a DevOpsifed-Mac-Centric world, finding a good editor is a challenge - the best two native Windows text editors I have found are the good ‘ol Notepad++ and more recently Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Recently I was introduced to a web based IDE called CodeAnywhere. There are a ton of great features packed in, but maybe the most impressive to me is the free container they provide you to actually test the code you are writing.

You can chose an empty development box or a number of preconfigured boxes running on either CentOS or Ubuntu using as PHP, Node.js or Python to name the SEO friendly ones a few. In addition to the boxes I can use right within the web based editor, I can also connect to Google Drive, S3, or GitHub to access my files/code from any device without having to install anything.

For example, in the screenshot below I created a new project called test, connected my GitHub account and selected my Ansible test playbook repo. The wizard then helped me setup a Python container running on CentOS

Once the container is provisioned, I can see the specs for my environment, and have a console to it with all of the files from my selected GitHub repo ready to role! Here you can see I’ve opened one of my playbooks in vi in the console at the bottom of the screen and opened a file in the text editor in the top.

I’ll be using this for the most part going forward to see how comfortable it is compared to OS native applications. One item I hope they add is the ability to display markup languages split screen, similar to how I do in Microsoft Code and add support for Markdown. Not bad for a free web based IDE huh?

In this post, I want to review something I have been using for a few years to stay productive at work. Before we get to that, however, there is something I need you to accept - you cannot multitask. Okay, maybe you can breath and chew bubblegum while working, but when it gets past some of the bodies basic functions, you simply can’t do more than one thing at a time. If you have manager who expects you to multitask, what they really mean is for you to be able to have multiple different projects or technologies in your work queue at the same time, but you can only ever do one of those things at a time.